The Lolita Effect: The Media Sexualization of
Young Girls and What We Can Do About ItBy M. Gigi Durham Overlook Press

THE LOLITA EFFECT MAKES alarmingly
clear that Lolita, the flirty, 12-
year-old protagonist of
Vladimir Nabokov’s
novel Lolita, has grown
into cultural shorthand
for a “prematurely,
even inappropriately
sexual, little girl.” M.
Gigi Durham argues
that the media oversexualizes
girls and
supports her case with
an accounting of a
range of products
advertised for them,
such as the Little Miss
Naughty push-up bras for preteens
and Peekaboo Pole Dancing kits for television, music, magazines and
print ads, conspire to turn young
girls into what Durham says some journalists have termed
“prosti-tots,” “kinderwhores” and
“sex bait.”

Durham is a “pro-sex” feminist.
She believes children are sexual beings
who have the right to experience
and express their sexuality—and by
children, she means an age range of
roughly 3 to 18. Yet she is concerned
by a volatile social and media dynamic
dominated by either Christianfundamentalist
chastity or hypersexual
excess. “Why is there no middle
ground?” she asks. The Lolita Effect is
her attempt to provide one by teaching
parents how to talk with their
daughters about sexualized images in
popular culture.

The book is based on what
Durham describes as the five myths
of sexuality. She offers helpful, if generalized,
discussions on how they
came into being, their pervasiveness
in the media and why they have so
much appeal for girls, capping each
discussion with a list of talking points
designed to help parents engage with
their kids.

One exercise Durham offers to debunk
the myth that violence is sexy is
to ask girls to substitute another type
of person, or even an animal, for the
girl or woman depicted
in the media text.
When the substitution
of an old person or a
kitten turns the image
from sexy to sinister,
girls gain a new tool
for understanding.
This is the sort of
thing Durham surely
does in her classroom
at the University of
Iowa, where she teaches
journalism and mass
communication. The
degree to which these strategies will
be effective with children seems debatable,
but that’s why this book is meant more for parents than for girls,
particularly since kids can’t obtain
most of these products without parents’
help.

Peekaboo Pole Dancing kits, designed
“to unleash the sex kitten inside,”
were available online through
the giant British-based retailer Tesco
and cost £49.97 (roughly $100).
Tesco argued the poles were meant
for adults (as does Amazon.com,
which sells them in the U.S.), though
the pole appears too flimsy to support
a grown-up woman’s weight. Its “cartoon
lady” packaging indicates that if
not meant for kids, the Peekaboo
Pole marketing doesn’t intend to exclude
them.

Under public pressure, Tesco removed
the Peekaboo Pole from its
Toys and Games website, and
British Home Store stopped selling
the Little Miss Naughty bras. The
Lolita Effect does not advocate censorship,
but Durham does want adults to
more actively and consciously monitor the sexualized products and images
that mass media encourage children
to consume. This will help
prevent the Lolita effect from taking
hold of girls, thus keeping Lolita the
stuff of fiction, where she belongs.

BRENDA R. WEBER is an assistant
professor in gender studies at Indiana
University, where she teaches gender
and popular culture.